Therese Halsa

Therese Halsa (1954-) was a Black September Organization member and one of the hijackers of Sabena Flight 571.

Biography
Therese Halsa was born in 1954 in Acre, Israel to a family of Arab Christians, and she graduated from an Israeli school. Because of the growing hostility of Jews towards Arabs inside and outside of Israel, she joined the Palestine Liberation Organization, and in late 1971 she trained in using a handgun, explosive belts, and grenades at a training camp near Beirut in Lebanon. On 7 May 1972, she met with Rima Tannous, Ali Taha Abu Snina, and Abed al-Aziz Atrash, and the four of them posed as two young couples with forged passports. They made it to Vienna, and they boarded Sabena Flight 571 on its flight to Lod International Airport in Tel Aviv. The four hijackers had the plane land at Lod Airport, where they planned to trade the passengers for imprisoned terrorists. However, sixteen Sayeret Matkal commandoes under Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu stormed the plane and killed the two men, capturing the two women. Halsa and Tannous were sentenced to life in prison, but in November 1983 the two were released in a prisoner exchange during the Lebanese Civil War. In 2015, she supervised the creation of "Sabena Hijacking - My Version", a documentary film about the hijacking, mixing interviews from both Palestinians and Israelis.